


The World These Days

by Margo_Kim



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Aftermath, Character Study, Gen, Original Character(s), POV Alternating, POV Original Character, POV Sharon Carter, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, September 11 Attacks, Vignettes, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-19
Updated: 2014-06-19
Packaged: 2018-02-05 07:39:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1810549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three short vignettes of SHIELD agents reacting to the revelation that their agency isn't at all what they thought it was. One: Three friends discuss how the hell you're suppose to get your next job with "Nazi-adjacent agency" on your resume. Two: Some people are experienced at tragedy. Three: Sharon Carter thinks it's just amazing how quickly the upheaval of your entire world will put your crush for your aunt's old boyfriend on the back-burner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The World These Days

**Author's Note:**

> This is one of those fics where I feel like the audience might just be me, and I'm cool with that. My first thoughts coming out of the film were about all those nameless, faceless SHIELD employees who just had their lives as upturned as our heroes'. These three little stories stem from my desire to explore the people on the sidelines of the plot. They're linked more in purpose than plot, being the sole survivors of the dozen other quick fics I sketched out trying to develop this idea.

“So I’m genuinely unclear on this,” Mason said after the group’s first box of wine. “Do I list SHIELD on my résumé or not?”

Still facedown on the couch, as she’d been for the last hour, Trish said, “Hire me, I worked for the Nazis for three years.”

“We accidentally worked for the Nazis.” Veronica swirled the dregs in her mug, staring pensively at the red smear as she pondered the choices in her life that had brought her to that sentence. “Shit.”

“But they’re not the Nazis,” Mason said. They waggled their hand in a so-so gesture. “Hydra’s like…Nazi adjacent. That’s not better, I realize that’s not better, I realized it the second I said it.”

Veronica rubbed her hand over her face. “Shit.”

“Shit,” Mason agreed.

Trish said nothing as she was still working on her plan to slow motion drown herself in Veronica’s upholstery.

“I mean, I’m cryptography,” Mason said. “Am I supposed to be like ‘hey ho, CIA, hire me to secure your communications. I did a pretty good job for the evil side!’”

Veronica twisted her hands around the mug and grimaced. “I had a friend who worked at Enron. I could ask him how he handled all that. I think he just lies. But I don’t know, he’s a shitty person. He works in the financial district so he’s just surrounded by shitty people too so that probably helps.”

“He didn’t accidentally dedicate his life to the service of Nazis, though. He’s got that going for him.”

From the couch, Trish let out another low-pitched keen of despair like a baleful car alarm. Mason patted her on the calf. “Are you going to the hospital tomorrow?” they asked.

Veronica went for another drink. The mug was empty. She looked down at it, unable to shake the feeling that it had personally betrayed her, before she put it on the coffee table and laid back on the carpet. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll try. I don’t think my security clearance is high enough.”

“What, you’re not trying to see Captain America or anything,” Mason said.

“Same hospital, though. And we’ve decided, apparently, that we’re scared of double agents sneaking in. No one under level 5 is supposed to come near the place.”

Mason looked like this was the last thing they needed to hear today. “Shit.” A pause. “ _Shit_. They can’t keep me out. I’ve got to see John and Kiara and Denver and, and—I’ve got too many people to visit to stay away.”

“We’ve all got too many people to visit.” Unless you didn’t have anyone to visit, Veronica thought. That was an option too. Some teams were just—gone. Killed by Hydra. Comprised entirely of Hydra. It was the same in the end, except it _wasn’t_ because you needed to know who to mourn and who to curse. Veronica had shot Melody Remy before Melody Remy could shoot her, and they’d come through academy together. They’d saved each other’s lives in the fields more time than Veronica could count. And now—

“I hate this,” Mason said.

Veronica kicked the empty wine box off the table. Since she was currently lying prone on the floor, her hands covering her eyes, it took a few attempts. “This is not our fault,” she said after she finally managed it, once Mason nudged the box in the direction of her flailing foot. “No one could have seen that coming.”

“We’re an _intelligence agency_.” Mason flopped on the floor beside Veronica, their face half-buried in the shag carpet. They seemed to have opted for Trish’s approach to coping. Veronica let her arms flop to the side and stared at her living room’s ceiling light. Maybe if she blinded herself that would improve things. She wasn’t sure how that would go. But she was certainly mulling over the possibilities. “How did _everyone_ mess up so bad?” Mason asked quietly.

Half muffled from her mouth pressed into the cushion, Trish said, “We were supposed to be the good guys.”

Yeah. Yeah, they were. And it turns out they weren’t. And they never were. No one said anything much after that. Trish had said the only thing that they’d needed to say.

***

Kiara had been twelve when the planes hit, at the beginning of Mrs. Butterfield’s fifth grade. She remembered Mrs. Butterfield being called out of the classroom by someone from the office, and she remembered Mrs. Butterfield coming back in with a strange shocked look on her face, before she picked her whiteboard marker back up and got back to explaining Virginia’s House of Burgesses as if she’d never stopped. Then the kids started being called out, Olivia first because her mom pulled her out like _all the time_ for super dumb things, so that wasn’t surprising, but then it was Brock and then Roger and Britney, Carly and Jon and Sam. Then it was half the class, and then three-fourths, and by the time one o’clock rolled around, there was no one in the class except Kiara and that weird girl Jazmin and Mrs. Butterfield.

“What’s going on?” Kiara had asked. She hadn’t been scared—just annoyed. Her mom _would_ leave her in school when everyone else was getting out.

“Let’s join Ms. Cho’s class,” Mrs. Butterfield said instead.

In the hallway, as they walked from their practically empty classroom to the other GT fifth grade room, Jazmin leaned in close enough to Kiara that she could smell her nasty garlic breath from her dumb homemade lunches. “Someone blew up Washington,” she said.

“Shut up,” Kiara replied.

“I heard it. I went to the bathroom and two old ladies were talking about it in the hall. They blew up New York too.”

“Shut up. That didn’t happen.”

“I heard it,” Jazmin insisted, her eyes wide and earnest. “It was the Arabs. My dad fought them before I was born.”

The only Arabs Kiara knew lived in the townhouse to the left. The mother was six months pregnant and she said that when the baby was born, Kiara could babysit her when she was little older. “That’s dumb,” Kiara said. “You’re so weird.”

Kiara spent the afternoon playing Apples to Apples with some girls from the base program and Jazmin. Jazmin didn’t say anything about cities being blown up to anyone else. She mostly just seemed to want to win. Until it was almost the final bell, and the two of them were left cleaning up the game while everyone else packed, and Jazmin said, “My dad works in the Pentagon.” And when Kiara didn’t respond, Jazmin said, “If there was a war right now, my dad’d be fighting.”

“There’s not a war,” Kiara said. But Mrs. Butterfield and Ms. Cho had spent an hour with their heads together, talking only to each other with that look Kiara’s mom had on her face whenever she talked to her sister about the cancer. Kiara’s mom worked in DC too. “And he fought in a war before, right? So he’s probably pretty good at it.” But Jazmin wouldn’t look at her as she mixed the cards together, the red and the green and slotted them back in the box. Kiara bit her lip, the braces digging in, and said, “You can sit with me with on the bus if you want or whatever.”

Bus 54 was nearly empty too. It was like half the world had disappeared and the other half was left trying to figure out why. Kiara and Jazmin could sit almost all the way to the back. Behind them, sixth graders talked about how the world was ending. A plane had hit the Pentagon. And two others had hit something else, trade towers, but Kiara didn’t know what those were, and she’d seen the Pentagon. She looked sideways at Jazmin, who stared out the bus window at the red leaves of autumn.

“My dad’s dead,” Jazmin said.

Kiara reached out and grabbed Jazmin’s hand. Jazmin didn’t squeeze back, but she didn’t move it either.

“My mom’s dead too,” Jazmin said. “She died when I was five.”

Kiara didn’t know what to say. She didn’t even know what the right words would feel like in her mouth. She whimpered a little in sympathy, as something larger than anything she’d ever known rolled over her and crushed her flat. “You can have my parents!” she said, desperate to offer something. Jazmin wouldn’t look away from the window. “My dad’s a cook! And he likes playing baseball and he takes me to the pool whenever I want. And my mom’s a secret! She can’t tell us what she does, but Tiana says she’s a spy, and Mom says that she’ll tell me when I’m older, and she’s got like twelve guns so she’s probably a spy. She’s really nice! You can share them with me.”

“I don’t want your parents,” Jazmin said, and she burst time tears so loudly that the bus fell silent and all you could hear were her ragged sobs as Peter drove on.

Now that she’s older, Kiara thinks a lot about Peter, the driver, who ferried her to elementary school for seven years, and how he must have felt that day, a child sobbing in the back of his bus while the nation seemed to be falling down around his ears. What did he feel as he approached their townhouse complex, slowing, stopping, the door to the brand new bus creaking open, and watching as one young girl half-carried, half-dragged another down the aisle? Kiara remembers that as the longest walk of her life, carrying her classmate like a wounded soldier, and in that moment, she thought to herself— _I never want anyone ever to experience this again_. And to this day, she’s not sure whether she meant Jazmin’s loss or Kiara’s helplessness.

She still remembers the pneumatic hiss of the bus door closing behind them. All her life from that point, tragedy has sounded like that door. It closed on the life you lived before. All you have after is the life you live now. Because waiting at the bus station was a harried looking man in uniform who said, “Jazmin!” And Jazmin looked up and screamed, “Dad!” and pushed herself out of Jazmin’s arms to run towards him, and perhaps they embraced, and perhaps they cried, but Kiara will never know, because all she saw was her own father standing there, in that old leather jacket that she’s taken for herself these days, and a face of brittle, painful strength.

“Your mom—” is all he can say before he drops to his knee and swallows her in his arms.

Here, Kiara falters, the story slips from her, and as she gathers herself, the former Agent 13 says, “I’m so sorry.”

Kiara takes a shuddering breath, that nearly cracks her ribs the state they’re in right now, and says, “Not your fault. I’m sorry to be dumping this on you. With everything that’s happening.”

Agent 13—Sharon, just Sharon now—smiles wanly and pats Kiara’s knee through the stiff white hospital blankets. “Don’t worry about it. Don’t take this the wrong way, but—” Sharon gestures at the ward, filled to the brim with injured SHIELD agents. Probably SHIELD agents. They’d fought like SHIELD agents when it mattered, and maybe that’s enough. Kiara suspects it might not be. But she’s lost more friends today than she can count, and she doesn’t think she can stand losing one goddamn more, not to death, not to treason. Sharon looks back with an apologetic look. “A little past tragedy is easy to take than the present one.”

Kiara snorts, and if it’s a laugh that wetter and sadder than a laugh has a right to be, neither of them mention it. “She was SHIELD,” Kiara said. “My mom. When Agent Skretkowski recruited me, he showed me her file. SHIELD liaison to the Pentagon.” Kiara leans back into her pillow and closed her eyes. If she thinks long and hard enough, she can remember the outline of her mother’s face. Not what lay within, no, but the bumps of her braids, the point of her chin, the ridges of her cheeks. She smelled like lavender and baby powder. “He came and recruited me two minutes before my valedictorian speech, by the way.” Kiara opens her eyes and raises an eyebrow at Sharon. “I’m not sure how you felt about high school, but I’m pretty sure not opening and closing my speech with ‘fuck all y’all, I’m a secret agent’ was the hardest thing I’ve ever done for this job.”

Sharon laughs, and after a moment, Kiara does as well, and it feels good to forget for a moment that once more the doors have shut on her old life, and something new must begin again.

That day at the bus stop, Kiara had not cried. She held her father as he clung to her, a man adrift, as he would have clung to her mother if Kiara had been the one who died. Her dad was a good man, a great father, but he was water, patient and flowing. You need water. But you can’t build a house on it. Kiara was rock. If she wasn’t before that walk down the bus, she was afterwards.

Sharon rubs her hands over her face, and she looks so tired that Kiara thinks about scooting over to offer her half the hospital bed. But Sharon can’t stay long, and hey, it’s really not that wide of a bed. “I’m glad you survived,” Sharon says wearily. “Whatever happens next, we’re going to need you.”

The fear and pain of September 11th had spun endless, pointless, bloody wars that devoured the loss of that day again and again across the globe. The terror and horror of the Battle of New York had accelerated the next stage of warfare, which currently lay in flaming debris across the part of the District. And how many parents are waiting at bus stops today? How many children are growing up right now? And across the world, in the scars and bleeding wounds her nation’s fear had carved, how many people are just grateful that to reckon with this tragedy, America has nowhere to look but within?

What world is being born right now?

She isn’t scared. She isn’t even angry, though she was and she’s gonna be again when it’s time to feel things like that. She’s sad. She’s tired. She’s recovering from an Algerian mercenary kicking her three times in the chest. But mostly, she’s just thinking this—there’s work to be done. And Kiara’s got the strength to do it, and that’s all that needs to be said, really.

She can’t be certain, but she thinks her mother would be proud.

“Yeah,” Kiara said. “You’re going to need me.”

***

Agent 13 had no romantic interest regarding Captain America. Sharon Carter regarding Steve Rogers, however—that was a different issue. She was an honest woman, as honest as you get in times and places like this, which means she didn't lie about things that didn't matter. So she wouldn't lie to you now. She wanted to raise that American flag.

("Gross," was Hill's reply to that, but Hill had her own little crush thing with Thor going on so she couldn't judge.)

Sharon didn't expect that she ever would entangle with Steve in that manner. She couldn't while she was monitoring him undercover, since she wasn't a piece of shit, and she doubted that he'd want anything to do with her once the truth was out. And Sharon was okay with that, she was. If she broke to pieces over every crush that would never be, she'd never have made it out of middle school. And besides Steve's smile and hip-to-waist ratio and general way he lit a room just by being in it, those were all nice. Sure. But Aunt Peggy had dated him. So that was that. Sharon loved Aunt Peggy—loved her, cherished her, honored her with ferocity—and because she'd loved Aunt Peggy, she wouldn't bother to compete with her. She couldn't, for one, and she didn't want to, for another. Part of the reason she held a torch for Steve was because of Aunt Peggy's stories, narratives filtered through love and nostalgia and loss. It didn't matter how good a man Steve was. The reality would never be as purely, solidly good as she dreamed he was.

(And she was correct. No, she was. Captain Rogers was a soldier, same as any soldier, or rather, better than any soldier but cut from the same cloth. He went on missions. He killed enemies. He attended debriefings. He went on missions again. He racked up rescues. He killed more enemies. He attended debriefings. He went on missions again. He got curt, he felt pain, he missed jokes, he snapped. He apologized, he tried harder, he failed anew, he withdrew. He was, in short, human, his every good quality matched by the undertone of something tarnished. It was important that she remembered that, as tempted as she could be to forget. Idol worship was no better in the military than it was at the foot of the mountain, and the temptation to make Captain America a star-spangled cow would only keep you looking in the wrong direction. You could make the case for Steve as Moses coming down the mountain, not the originator of goodness but its messenger, but Sharon thought better than that. It wasn't that she thought the metaphor didn't hold up, it was just that making Steve into Moses in her mind wasn't a better way to humanize him.)

Sharon hadn't expected to love Steve, and she hadn't expected him to love her. She had held out some hope that he would like her. But she hadn't expected that either.

When they passed in the hall, Nick Fury's blood still flecked under her nails, still smeared across his hands, his eyes were cold as winter. And that was that.

Then they're hunting him down. Then he's taking them down. She was on the Helicarrier when Loki sent it plummeting down, and the ground had felt more secure under her feet then than it did now. When he breaks into their radio chatter, when he yanks the curtains back, Sharon wondered if she was the only one relieved. They were compromised, and they always had been. Captain America was not, and he never had been. The world made sudden, awful sense again.

(This, of course, was Sharon thinking. Agent 13 was currently pointing a gun at a mean son of a bitch she'd never liked anyway.)

In the aftermath, she didn’t think much about Captain America. It wasn’t until the reports came in that a search team had found him by river that it occurred to her that he’d been imperiled. Strange thing to say about a man who’d been declared dead, but it was hard to image him dying. But Sharon didn’t think much about him. There was rubble in her city. She may not be a SHIELD agent anymore, but she still knew how to work a broom.

On the fifth day, Hill came and found her. They changed into clothes that weren’t encrusted with dust and went to dinner, which ended up being buffalo wings and beer in a chain bar where no one paid any attention to anyone else. “Have you talked to her yet?” Hill asked, sucking hot sauce of her fingers. She didn’t need to say the name. Sharon knew.

Sharon looked down. She folded her napkin into a paper football. With her mouth full of chicken, Hill held up her fingers. Sharon flicked it through for a field goal. “Not yet. Soon.”

Hill eyed her and nodded. After she swallowed and dabbed Sharon’s unfolded napkin against her mouth, she asked, “And have you seen _him_ yet?”

It took a moment for Sharon to realize who Hill was talking about. “ _He_ doesn’t want to see me.” And then, “Is he out of the hospital?”

Hill snorted. “Three days ago. Super healing.” She said that last bit in highly dubious tones, like she found something very suspicious about a man who didn’t easily die. “He might have left the area already. He’s got a mission.”

Sharon downed her beer and thought about the five bodies she’d helped drag out of the rubble today. “Don’t we all.”

On the sixth day, Sharon was officially CIA. It felt so mundane after what had been before. That was the morning, a monitored telephone call with Langley who had a job lined up for her already, hunting out a few more of Hydra’s heads. In the afternoon, Sharon laid flowers on Nick Fury’s modest grave. She hadn’t known the man very well—who had?—but she couldn’t think of another way to say goodbye to SHIELD.

She didn’t want to say goodbye. After everything that happened. SHIELD had taken everything from her. SHIELD had given her everything that mattered. And now SHIELD was dead as Nick Fury. There was nothing else to say. Kneeling in the dirt of the fresh grave, she pressed her hand against the cold headstone. Then she stood, turned around, and bumped into the chest of Captain America.

(Agent 13’s hand was halfway closed around her gun before she recognized him.)

He looked different, Sharon thought.

What a dumb thought, Sharon thought next.

“Hi,” is what she said.

“Hi,” Captain Rogers replied.

They regarded each other silently, strangers.

“I caught your big speech,” Sharon said. “It caused a hell of a stir.”

He didn’t laugh, but he smiled and looked away. “I heard you had my back.”

Sharon looked away too, but she’d looked away in the same direction that he had so they stood beside each other, contemplating the sunlit rows of tombstones together. “I did, Captain,” she said. “Must run in the family.”

And he said, “What does that mean?”

And she said, “You don’t know.”

And he said, almost whispered, as the world clicked into place, “Carter.”

And as she could see the paradigm shifting in his eyes, she said, “Her niece.”

It was funny how much it didn’t matter. She was still the spy who lied to him from the moment she met him. He was still the ideal that she didn’t want to make reality. This changed none of those facts. But he still looked at her with hungry eyes that he’d never cast over the hapless nurse neighbor, and it made something tighten inside her gut.

“I didn’t know,” he said.

She still faced out to the tombstones. He faced her. “I don’t like to advertise it,” she said. “You don’t want people crying nepotism.”

He wasn’t listening to that. She could tell by the slope of his shoulders, the closing of his eyes, that he was circling the same awful thought that she’d been avoiding. “Has anyone told her?”

Sharon looked at him. She let that be her answer.

What was she supposed to say? _No. We’ve kept it from her. No one wants to be the one who says it. No one wants to take a dying woman’s lifework away from her. Who is going to be the one to spit in her face and laugh? Bark “Hail Hydra” as they set her legacy to fire in front of her._ But that wasn’t why Peggy Carter had been insulated from the truth. It was far, far more selfish than that. For her, SHIELD was still alive. For her, SHIELD was still good. And anyone who was close enough to break the truth wasn’t ready to do it yet.

Steve nodded, as if he’d heard. “I’ve got to tell her.”

“No,” Sharon said, anger bursting like gunpowder. She paused and the smoke settled. The after burn was still there though, and it gave soft fire to the words she said half to Captain Rogers and half to the listening air. “She’s my family. She’s my aunt.” She’s my hero. “I should be the one to tell her.” And though he didn’t try to speak again, Sharon said, “It’s me. It’s me. This is my duty. This is on me.” And when he came over and rested his hand on her shoulder, Sharon shook her head and said once more, “This is the mission.”

If she wasn’t away on assignment, Sharon visited Aunt Peggy once a week, at the same house Aunt Peggy had lived all of Sharon’s life. It felt as large as it ever had. When Sharon walked into the bedroom, Aunt Peggy was asleep. She slept a lot these days. They were getting close to the end. Maybe it would be a mercy to let her die without knowing.

When Aunt Peggy stirred and tightened her hand around Sharon’s, Agent 13 said, “SHIELD’s gone. That’s good. Here’s why.”

There’s a place for mercy. Women like them didn’t live there.


End file.
